Really close encounters

January 25, 2009|By Scott Turow, a Chicago attorney and the author of several novels, including "Limitations"

Like thousands of Chicagoans, I have known Barack Obama since before he was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1994. My relationship with the president fell in that middle zone, neither an intimate nor a mere acquaintance. I was an early political supporter and an occasional sounding board on literary and political and legislative issues.

And so I decided I should go to last week's inauguration. There were political meanings to me as somebody who had once been one of those white kids involved in the civil rights movement. But mostly I wanted to be there because it was almost certainly the only time in my life that I would see someone I could legitimately refer to as a friend become the president of the United States.

Getting to an event that literally millions of people wanted to attend was, naturally, challenging. Every detail -- procuring tickets to the ceremony and a ball, then picking them up; finding a place to stay; figuring out how to get around -- required the assistance of dozens of friends and logistics more fitting for a small invasion. But on Monday afternoon my girlfriend and I boarded an airplane, in seats I'd been daring enough to book before the election.

Knowing the size of the crowd that was being projected, we vowed to handle any snafu. The truth is that given the road closings, I wasn't sure we would ever get out of the Washington airport. But my resolve to be patient and to stay in the moment was put to the test Tuesday after we lined up at 9 a.m. at the gates that were supposed to open for the swearing-in ceremony at noon. Somehow, whoever was in charge decided that the path of the tens of thousands of people with blue tickets would cross the path of the vast populations with orange and silver tickets. As a result we crept forward no more than 200 feet over the course of the next 2 1/2 hours. There were no police, no volunteers and no information about what the problem was. It was the worst crowd management I'd seen since one of those Washington peace marches I attended in the late 1960s when I alighted from an overnight bus trip only to stand still for the entire duration of the so-called march. But those event organizers were not professionals. In this case, many, even perhaps most, of the thousands and thousands of ticket-holders for two standing sections never got inside the gates. And we were among them.

As it became apparent to those who in many cases had traveled great distances to witness this moment that, instead, they might not actually see it, there were predictable responses. Some people, despite shouts and boos, broke the snaking line to wiggle their way ahead of others, an odd way to celebrate an event that exalted American equality. But most of us waited in the cold, muttering a bit, chanting "Let us in" a few times and, often, joking. More than one person pointed out that this mess should not be taken as an omen, but, rather, as the last act of the Bush administration.

As noon approached, word filtered back that several metal detectors were broken and the gates had been closed. Vexed and disappointed, thousands of people marched off to find a TV, but we decided to remain at the locked entrance.

As the crowd dissipated, we could hear the rumble of voices from the Capitol on the speakers and we preferred even that fragment of the live event. We stood among hundreds of other closed-out ticket-holders who gathered in small knots around individuals who had used their cell phones to call home, where the other end was being held up to the TV. We heard Barack Obama take the oath as our 44th president, first as an indistinct echo and then, given the two-second broadcast delay, on the speakerphone of a middle-age African-American woman who became a fountain of tears as soon as the new president said "so help me God."

And we listened to Obama's first address as president on the cell of a young woman from Seattle who would periodically scream, "Mom, you can't walk around with the phone. Stand still!" My girlfriend was rattling with the cold by then and I activated a chemical warming pack we had bought. Instead, she gave it to the girl from Seattle who was holding her phone barehanded so she could press the buttons and share the speech with the rest of us.

The inaugural aftermath went closer to plan. Afraid of being trapped again, we avoided the Metro and walked miles all over the thronged city where the sirens of the cars speeding dignitaries here and there never seemed to stop keening. We partied that night and even made it to the Midwestern Ball at a perfect moment, just as the Bidens arrived. Forty-five minutes later, I got the electric experience I'd hoped for when a guy I know named Barack Obama appeared through the curtains, just as a disembodied voice intoned, "Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States."